Megaupload User Asks Court to Return His Data

An Ohio small business owner has petitioned the federal judge overseeing the Megaupload case for the return of his files. He relied on the online file-sharing locker to store video that he filmed for his business.

A small business owner has asked a federal judge to prevent data stored on Megaupload servers from being deleted. The next step is to figure out a way for users like him to recover their files.

Kyle Goodwin is a sports reporter who covers local high school sports and runs OhioSportsNet, a company that films and streams high school sporting events online. Goodwin was a paid member and used the cloud service as a backup library for his copyrighted footage. Goodwin was among the 66.6 million users who lost all access to the files they’d stored on the file-sharing service when federal authorities seized Megaupload servers and shut it down Jan. 19.

No one is denying the fact the site hosted some illegal content, but the question seems to be just how much. The Justice Department and the entertainment industry claimed Megaupload, which allowed users to upload large files and share them with others, was used almost exclusively for sharing pirated content. But as it quickly became clear through angry posts on Twitter, there were plenty of legitimate users who lost access to their personal documents, images, and video instantly.

“What is clear is that Mr. Goodwin, the rightful owner of the data he stored on Megaupload, has been denied access to his property,” civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, who is representing Goodwin, wrote in a legal brief filed Mar. 30.

Goodwin claimed his hard drive containing the original footage crashed just before the federal government shut down Megaupload. Without access to his hard drive or the video backup on Megaupload, he is unable to finish making highlight reels for athletes to send to prospective colleges and a full-length documentary about a local girls’ soccer team, according to the brief.

Megaupload leased some of its servers from hosting company Carpathia. Federal agents seized more than 1,000 servers containing over 25 petabytes of data as part of the raid, and told Carpathia the data could be deleted and servers repurposed once the Justice Department was done examining the servers. Carpathia recently moved for a protective order requesting an approved procedure for customers to retrieve their files before the data is deleted permanently.

This is the first brief filed on the behalf of a Megaupload user. There is no way to determine exactly how many users had data related to their business or other legitimate purposes, but it’s expected to be fairly large.

“The government itself created the problem of an overbroad seizure by utilizing a method that predictably encompasses innocent property,” the EFF said.

Legitimate users are not the only ones interested in preserving Megaupload data. The Motion Picture Association of America also recently asked the data not be deleted from the servers so that it could use the information as part of its lawsuit against Megaupload.

Fahmida Y. Rashid is a senior analyst for business at PCMag.com. She focuses on ways businesses can use technology to work efficiently and easily. She is paranoid about security and privacy, and considers security implications when evaluating business technology. She has written for eWEEK, Dark Reading, and SecurityWeek covering security, core Internet infrastructure, and open source.
Follow me on Twitter: zdfyrashid
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